"When I was an apprentice I was constantly being sent down to the hardware store for such hardware as was used in the coach-making business, which store was situated on the exact spot where the Harper Building now stands. I remember very well of becoming well acquainted with the man who there kept the hardware store, and many years after a certain old man called in my store, when I occupied the store where the Bible House now is, and informed me that Mr. Vreeland, who then occupied the hardware store where the Harper (building) now is--when Mr. Vreeland had built the glue factory on the old Middle Road and had established his son in it, his son had become so dissipated as to entirely neglect his business, that he wanted to sell the property. I, hearing this, when he came by my house I stopped him and asked if it was true that he had a factory that he wanted to sell. He said he had a desire very much to sell it. I just stepped into my store, put on my hat and went up with him to look at it, and when I saw what he had there for sale and the price he asked for it I concluded at once to take it and told him that I would take it at the price at which he offered it. I went right downtown with him, without going home, and closed the bargain and paid him for it and went into a new business, from the grocery to the glue business, believing that if other people could carry it on I could try to do so. The situation of this was on the old Middle Road, occupying about three acres of ground which bounded it from Thirty-first to Thirty-fourth Street."
Drawing of Peter Cooper's grocery store from Frank Leslie's Illustrated.
